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19 to racetracks at places like Summit Point and Nelson Ledges.” Racing quickly satisfied Leto’s need for physical testing and engineering. And in his first year as a mechanic for a car dealership, he met yet another great engineering author, Carroll Smith, who had worked with Carroll Shelby and the Ford Motor Company, overseeing the winning GT40 at Le Mans in 1966. “I’d read all his handbooks on how to prep and run racecars at college, and by a twist of fate I ended up working for him, learning from him and moving up the skills tree, eventually becoming a race engineer for the Truesports IndyCar team,” Leto says. “I stayed at IndyCar for most of my career following that, going from hands- on data acquisition into designing our own cars for Indy 1991 and 1992 using nothing but drafting boards, pen, paper and a tiny bit of CAD. That was a hugely innovative project for the time – one of the first full-carbon chassis cars for Indy. “We also did one of the first ever rolling-road wind tunnel installations in the US, and through that I honestly got more hours in a wind tunnel than I ever would have in aerospace. And over the 25 years I spent in motorsport, I must have spent 10,000-15,000 hours in wind tunnels.” Leto remarks that engineering in motorsport is quite unlike other industries. Budgets are often generous, freedom for creativity is plentiful, but there is a lot of pressure on rapid product development, and timelines do not slip – “The race is on Sunday whether you’re ready or not!” “I became a lead aerodynamicist, technical director and eventually COO for Rahal Racing in its various forms. But around the early 2000s the sizes of engineering teams and budgets exploded, because people were realising that winning teams needed to leverage all the latest technologies to get an advantage. “Wind tunnel tech advanced from scale-model testing to moving floors and huge advances in CFD simulation software. We started writing our own lap simulation software to model the entire vehicle, so that we could study and optimise every aspect of the engine, drivetrain, hull, controls and so on. “Finally, we started computationally modelling entire cars, to perform analyses that you really couldn’t do easily through wind tunnel tests or other physical testing forms,” he says. “I saw then that progress in vehicle engineering would one day depend on a perfect marriage between computational testing and physical testing – not only aerodynamics, but cooling, structural interactions, energy efficiency and so much more.” The TotalSim method Around the same time, in the early 2000s, Reynard Motorsport in the UK had formed a new division called Advantage CFD, which went on to build wind tunnels in England and the US. Through work as a factory team for Reynard, Leto met a member of their team by the name of Rob Lewis. By the late 2000s, Lewis and several former Advantage CFD employees spun off a new business called TotalSim, to continue the CFD consulting work that Advantage CFD was shedding. They sought support for handling their first clients in Honda’s manufacturing Ray Leto | In conversation Unmanned Systems Technology | April/May 2022 For robust modelling and simulation work, TotalSim has thousands of computer cores and a 10 Gbit/s connection to the Ohio Supercomputer Center’s 40,000-50,000 cores